Belated author's note:
The story about the whistling that Ethel tells was an embellishment on
my vague recollection of what i remembered as an urban legend that i
read when i was a kid. Since then i eventually tracked down the story, "The Whistle,” by C.B. Colby, which was first printed in the collection Strangely Enough,
(Scholastic, 1963) a book which was itself compiled of allegedly true
stories originally published in C. B. Colby's newspaper column
“Adventure Today,” which itself may have been sourced from a radio
program in which people called in with ghost stories. I have no idea if
it's an urban legend or not, basically, but Colby's (re)telling of the
story is where i got the idea from.